The Problem with Doing Everything in a Line Picture the last time you organized something genuinely complicated — a move across the country, a wedding, a conference. At some point, you probably realized that doing every task in sequence was killing you. You couldn't wait to finish booking the caterer before calling the venue, and you couldn't wait to confirm the venue before sending invitations. The entire operation required you to hold many threads simultaneously, farming out tasks to different people while you kept track of the whole picture. Now imagine that the person coordinating all of this could only use a telephone, and could only make one call at a time. That is, roughly, the state of most AI systems today when they face complex, real-world problems. They think in a line. They act in a line. And as tasks grow more intricate — research a topic, then design something, then write code, then verify the result — that single-file approach becomes not just slow but fundamentally inadequate.…